Biography
John Reed was an American journalist and revolutionary, best known for his eyewitness account of the 1917 Russian Revolution, Ten Days That Shook the World. He was a contributor to The Masses and a co-defendant with Max Eastman in the November 1917 federal indictment under the Espionage Act for conspiracy to obstruct military recruitment. The first trial (April 1918) ended in a hung jury; the second (October 1918) also ended in a hung jury, and the charges were dismissed. In 1919 Reed co-founded the Communist Labor Party of America in Chicago and was indicted in absentia on sedition charges by Illinois state authorities under the criminal-syndicalism statute. He fled to Soviet Russia, where he died of typhus in Moscow on October 19, 1920 at age 32. Reed is one of only three Americans buried at the Kremlin Wall Necropolis.
